March 2022 Summaries

The text outlines new plans introduced by Buildkite to enhance their CI/CD platform with features like Test Analytics, aiming for sustainable support and scalability. The new pricing strategy is designed to be usage-based, ensuring no limits on adding pipelines, increasing parallelism, or inviting team members. It introduces transparent fees with a per-job-minute charge reflecting orchestration and streaming costs, rather than compute retail costs, and offers a new Usage page to monitor job minutes. The Enterprise plan has been made self-service for easier upgrades, while existing customers will experience no immediate changes, with further instructions and self-migration tools to be provided in the coming weeks.

On March 30th, Buildkite introduced a new free plan that provides access to ultra-fast CI/CD pipeline tools previously used by major companies like Lyft and Pinterest. The free plan allows users to set up CI/CD pipelines for various projects, use powerful compute options, autoscale agents, parallelize builds across hundreds of jobs, run unlimited pipelines and concurrent builds, invite multiple collaborators, and utilize Buildkite Test Analytics Beta. This plan is available on private projects and open-source repositories across GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.

Keith Smiley, a Principal Engineer at Lyft, shared insights into the company's continuous integration (CI) evolution at UnblockConf '21, highlighting their transition to Buildkite and the integration of Bazel for iOS support. The journey began with challenges such as slow build times on macOS due to Apple's Xcode changes and the inefficiencies of compiling Swift. To tackle these, Lyft developed a flexible CI system that abstracts configurations, selects jobs via a fast Linux intermediary, and triggers jobs through APIs, allowing for diverse CI provider testing. The team moved towards self-hosting macOS machines to alleviate hosted service limitations, significantly reducing CI times from 20 to 5 minutes with Buildkite. Buildkite's dynamic pipelines, coupled with Lyft's custom scripts like generate_pipeline.py, optimize CI processes by querying GitHub and Bazel to determine necessary build tasks, thus improving CI machine utilization and developer experience. This setup allows Lyft to efficiently handle thousands of CI builds weekly, ensuring better resource allocation and reducing potential build bottlenecks.

The text discusses the importance of defining and documenting product design principles at Buildkite to enhance collaboration among product management, engineering, and product design teams, ensuring consistency and improvement in features. These principles serve as a shared language for design feedback and align with the company's values, ultimately facilitating better product design by helping teams navigate design challenges and customize solutions effectively. Four key principles are outlined: helping customers identify problems, providing a professional tool with a self-managed learning curve, allowing users to delve into complex features, and maintaining a trustworthy and friendly interface. The text emphasizes that establishing both principles and anti-principles guides teams in focusing on optimal outcomes, encouraging the creation and sharing of such frameworks for improved product design across various teams. Additionally, it invites readers to explore career opportunities at Buildkite, indicating the company's active growth and commitment to expanding its design team.

At UnblockConf '21, Shay Sofer, a Backend Engineer at Wix, discussed how the company addressed long build queue times in their CI system by adopting Buildkite, significantly reducing wait times from 40-60 minutes to mere seconds. Wix, with 220 million users and a vast infrastructure of over 2,000 microservices and 9,000 backend builds daily, faced challenges with their previous system due to the "bursty" nature of their builds and the inability to prioritize critical tasks like production hotfixes. By transitioning from Maven to Bazel and then to Buildkite, Wix improved build times by 90% and introduced features such as dynamic pipeline support, resilient notifications, and autoscaling using Kubernetes, which helped prevent "build storms" and optimized operational efficiency. This transition involved careful architectural decisions and the creation of mechanisms for safe migration, ultimately meeting the diverse needs of Wix's engineering team and infrastructure demands.

Build Matrix is an innovative feature introduced by Buildkite that allows users to create multiple job variants from a single step definition, simplifying complex and repetitive pipelines. By leveraging the {{matrix}} variable, users can expand a single step into multiple steps across different operating systems and architectures, such as macOS, Linux, and Windows, all within a unified framework. This approach minimizes boilerplate code and reduces pipeline management time, as demonstrated by a recent update to the Buildkite agent repository that significantly decreased the number of lines in a pipeline. Build Matrix also supports advanced features for power users, such as adding multiple dimensions and using the adjustments key to define all matrix elements, as well as grouping jobs for better clarity. The feature is now available to all Buildkite customers, with additional documentation provided for further guidance.

The text reflects on the tumultuous state of the world in 2022, marked by global crises such as the war in Ukraine, climate change-induced disasters, and the ongoing pandemic, while also exploring themes of gender equality and sustainability in the workplace. The author, an employee at the Australian company Buildkite, emphasizes the importance of a supportive and inclusive work environment, highlighting Buildkite's efforts in promoting gender diversity and employee well-being through policies like paid parental leave and flexible work hours. The narrative includes insights from various women at Buildkite who share their experiences and accomplishments within the tech industry, expressing a desire for genuine equality beyond the "women in tech" label. They advocate for an inclusive approach that values individual contributions regardless of gender, aiming for a future where societal and workplace equality are the norm.

After an 18-month hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Buildkite has relaunched its online store, offering a variety of new and returning products. The store now features the original Buildkite tee, Pride tee, and new apparel and stickers designed by Australian illustrator Magda Ksiezak. Proceeds from the Pride tee sales will continue to support Black Rainbow, a 100% Indigenous-owned organization promoting LGBTQI+SB health and wellbeing. The store sources its clothing from AS Colour, known for its commitment to social responsibility, and has partnered with Ozanam Industries for order fulfillment, supporting employment for individuals with disabilities. To improve international shipping reliability, Buildkite has also collaborated with Interparcel for global order tracking. Customers are encouraged to visit shop.buildkite.com to make purchases and share their experiences on social media.